Tim Marshall

Diplomatic Editor

That an Afghan policewoman should kill an American adviser outside the national police headquarters should not come as a surprise.

The details are still to be confirmed, but the suspicion is that the woman was a Taliban sympathiser possibly planted inside the force to commit exactly this sort of attack.

It became clear in 2011 that the Taliban had embarked on a tactic to infiltrate the Afghan police and army with sympathisers who would then kill their colleagues and foreign forces.

Given that the Taliban has programmed civilian women to be suicide bombers it is unsurprising that they can get a woman into the police force.

However, their success will cause alarm in Afghan intelligence circles as once again the vetting process for officers appears to have failed.

More than 60 international troops and civilian advisers have been killed in insider attacks this year alone causing huge mistrust between the Afghan forces and their allies. Around 50 Afghan government forces were also killed by their colleagues in 2012.

The latest killing came just hours after a policeman shot dead five of his colleagues at a checkpoint in the north. He then stole their weapons and fled to join the Taliban according to a government spokesman in Jawajan province.

The attacks do not just undermine confidence between the Afghan and international forces, they hit at the core of Nato’s strategy to get out of Afghanistan and leave behind a stable environment.

The Nato withdrawal is predicated on having enough well trained, honest, and dependable Afghan police and army units to be capable of holding the country together without the presence of tens of thousands of foreign troops.

Given the now obvious scale of Taliban infiltration into the ranks of domestic forces, questions are being asked about how capable they will be to hold back the expected Taliban surge in violence post the 2014 withdrawal.

Despite reassurances to the contrary by Western governments, the quality of the Afghan army and police is also under question.

The training programme for the police has been partially halted due to the insider attacks, and the low number of Afghans from the south joining the army continues to be a problem.

Much of the Afghan army is made up of men from the north of the country, many of them are ethnic Tajiks who speak Tajiki. Their ability, and resolve, to fight the mainly Pashtun speaking Taliban down south is under question.

One scenario for Afghanistan post 2014 is that the south will fall to the Taliban, the capital will remain under government control, and the north will be ruled, as it usually is, by various war lords.

The Western governments continue to insist that their training programme and plans are in good shape to ensure that Afghanistan can stabilise and prosper when the foreign troops have gone.